World Cup Blogs 20: Peru

I have one lifelong, abiding admiration for Peru's football team.  Until recently I thought this admiration was largely my own, but the good old internet has uncovered that I am far from alone.

When I say lifelong I mean from the 1970 World cup onward as I only heard the 1966 finals on the radio, and anyhow Peru did not qualify.  Here's a picture:

What do I admire?  The design of the Peruvian football shirts.  To an untutored eye just another shirt perhaps, but in reality unique in their design and strikingly stylish and memorable. Click on this sentence to read one of many articles that share my opinion.

So, although I couldn't readily call to mind the name of a single Peruvian footballer or a single Peruvian football result, I could easily remember or draw a picture of their kit.  They must have had a very clever stylist to design something so lastingly admired in the crowded field of football kits.

But no. 

It turns out that the design is derived from school footballers wearing a red sash over their shirts to distinguish them from the boys in the other team.  One of life's greatest and divine principles is that beauty is so often found in simplicity.  Consider the lilies, how they grow . . .

Starting Well

A good start is such a sealing happiness.  When we roar off the blocks it is clear to us and to all that we are heading for  the stars.

Take the Church where I am currently Pastor, for example.  It was founded (at the height of British Free Church popularity) in 1902.  I have been Pastor or Interim Pastor of several churches including one MegaChurch.  What they all share in common is that they began in tiny rooms with a handful of people.  The number of people covenanting together to form the first Church Membership was usually in the teens or the twenties at most.

Muswell Hill Baptist Church in its leafy London suburb roared off the blocks with 116 members.  One hundred and sixteen!!  And that's not all.  Just two years later the membership had more than doubled.  After six years it had nearly trebled.  Even a cursory statistical projection would mean that at that rate of addition the current membership would be many thousands. (It isn't).  At that rate of multiplication the membership of Muswell Hill Baptist Church would, many years ago, have included every human being on earth!

It was a good start.

Probably no-one thought about it too much in those heady times, but the Bible is very short of encouragement regarding sparkling starts.  It seems almost obsessed with a good ending.

For example we might think of the story of the sower.  Some seed starts badly but much of it well.  All that matters is the ending, the harvest.  On another track, we cannot understand the mission of Jesus Christ by stopping at Christmas or the Sermon on the Mount.  We may go further: the very definition of a Christian is someone who finishes - Be faithful to the point of death and I will give you a crown of life.  You cannot go through a deconversion.  You can stop professing and this is a mark of non-conversion.

Starting well is never the end of the story.

Disconnect

Jesus said, "Do not worry about tomorrow" (Matthew 6).  Tomorrow is our Church's anniversary day.

We are blessed by being disconnected from our future.  Joseph Parker lyricised it thus:

What if tomorrow’s cares were here

Without its rest!

I’d rather He unlocked the day;

And, as the hours swing open, say,

“My will is best.”

The very dimness of my sight

Makes me secure;

For, groping in my misty way,

I feel His hand; I hear Him say,

“My help is sure.”

To the unbeliever, the one certainty that the future holds for all human beings is decline and death.  This, Jesus has conquered!  For the believer decline and death are the two things that can be definitively ruled out.  Jesus has disconnected us.

We are blessed in as far as we can choose to be disconnected from our past.  Lots of stuff there we want to hold in memory but plenty else:  sudden deaths, failed tests, disrupted relationships, missed opportunities, wasted years - I could go on. One thing I do, letting go those things which are past, and stretching out to the things which are before, wrote Paul the apostle.

Jesus has detached the past from us, our sins forgiven, our defeats redeemed, our failings covered, our inner wounds healed.

But there is not a third disconnect - a disconnect from the present. We may wish there was. We may behave as though there is. But with the future unrevealed and the past put behind us the Present is the location of service, commitment, attachment. 'If anyone desires to come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow Me'. Today is mine!  I must make it His.

"I am only one, but I am one. I cannot do everything, but I can do something. What I can do, that I ought to do. And what I ought to do, by the grace of God, I shall do." (Edward Everett Hale).

Duilisc before Carcair

Activist Christianity struggles to grasp this but, honestly, the work and worship of God transcends filled diaries. Look at this section from a wonderful old Celtic prayer-poem, attributed (possibly correctly in this case) to Columba;

At times kneeling to beloved Heaven -

At times psalm singing;

At times contemplating the King of Heaven

Holy the chief;

At times at work without compulsion

This would be delightful.

At times plucking duilisc from the rocks

At times at fishing;

At times giving food to the poor;

At times in a carcair:

The poem pictures a life devoted to God in which formal worship is offered at times to the Chief of Heaven. But there are also times to pluck duilisc.

Although beaches often feature in today's commercials the people on the beach are almost always running or jumping (or surfing, or horse-riding, or driving).  Even the sea edge has become a busy place in our society.

Columba, in common with all Celtic saints, knew that God would not be neglected by taking time to enjoy his handiwork. Thus we imagine the breezy summer Atlantic shoreline and a man in a habit plucking juicy seaweed (duilisc) from the rocks just because he can, and it's free, and God is there. Duilisc washes in on the tides from June to September; you won't get to pluck any in January even if you can stand upright on the windswept, gloomy, wave-lashed shore. Get plucking because there are also times in a carcair.

We don't know exactly what carcair meant for Columba. A carcair was a prison - it may have meant the enclosed hermitage or imprisonment by hostile communities. But either way it was a great loss of the freedom that the seaweed-plucker enjoys!

We are wise to remember how, a little further inland, the Lord said in his greatest discourse, 'Consider the lilies of the field how they grow'. He credited us with the intelligence to realise that such consideration would only happen by taking the opportunity while it blooms and before the carcair, or in his case the cross, at a time yet to be.